I didn’t see Brad again until Monday afternoon, when a cold mist was coming off the ocean, and I decided to explore the cliff walk. Miranda was napping. That morning we had driven up the coast to look at a lighthouse that was apparently worth looking at. It was at the end of a hook of land where the fog was particularly thick. We took photographs in which the lighthouse was barely visible, then drove farther up the coast and ate lunch at a clam shack that was closing for the season that week. Returning to the inn, Miranda suggested a nap, as she did every afternoon, and I joined her. In a strange way, the sex we’d been having since I knew that Miranda was unfaithful was better than it had been before. Anger toward my wife had made me become selfish, less interested in her needs, and only interested in mine, and she was responding to me in ways she never had before. That afternoon I had flipped Miranda onto her stomach and entered her from behind, holding her in that position even after she told me she wanted me facing her. I spread my body along hers, pushing my face into the tangled hair at her neck, gripping her wrists. I was surprised when she came shortly before I did, emitting a strange yelping sound. Afterward, she murmured, “You were quite the animal today. I liked it.” She curled into the fetal position and I watched her fall asleep. I counted the knuckles of her spine, studied the dual dimples above her buttocks, wondered about a quarter-size bruise high up on her thigh. As she began to lightly snore, my thoughts turned paranoid again. Was she this relaxed after having sex with Brad? Did she consider this her due, a lifetime of men catering to all her needs? All the tension that the sex had temporarily extinguished came flooding back. I wondered what it would feel like to punch her as hard as I could in the back of the neck.
I dressed and slipped out of the room, not leaving a note. I felt better once I was on the cliff walk, enveloped in the cold mist, staring out toward the opaque ocean. I walked fast, concentrating on the slippery footing, trying not to think of the last time I had taken this route to the house. When I reached the end of the walk, I checked my watch, noting that it had taken a little over thirty minutes to reach my new home from the Kennewick Inn. I stood on the bluff, staring toward the rear of my house. I wasn’t afraid of being spotted this time. I was a lord surveying my manor. I walked across the damp stretch of land, then looped around toward the front of the house through a stand of balsam firs. As I approached the driveway, I watched a truck pull away, and assumed I had just missed Brad. But as I came fully around the house, I saw his two-toned pickup truck, with him next to it, a cigarette jutting from his lips. He was punching a number into his cell phone, but stopped when he spotted me. He smiled and the cigarette bobbed up and down. I smiled back and walked toward him, hand outstretched.
It was time I got to know Brad Daggett.
CHAPTER 8
LILY
I hadn’t planned on falling in love, but who does? Eric Washburn was a junior, and president of a “literary” fraternity at Mather called St. Dunstan’s, although I didn’t know that at the time I met him. We met in the library. It was closing time on a frigid February night, and we were the last to leave, passing through the swinging glass doors together into an eye-watering wind. Eric offered me a cigarette, which I didn’t accept, then lit his own, and asked me what direction I was going in. He walked me to Barnard Hall, a gesture that at the time seemed born entirely from gallantry, and not from more sinister motives. At my entryway, he invited me to a Thursday night party at St. Dunstan’s. I told him I would come. He wasn’t particularly handsome; he had a long face and a high forehead, a bony nose and too-big ears, but was tall and slender, and his voice was deep and almost melodic. That night he was wearing a long, charcoal gray coat and a burgundy scarf that he had wrapped several times around his neck. I had heard of St. Dunstan’s, knew that it was the most elite society at a college that already had its share of prep-school snobbery, and I was very familiar with its location, the Manor, a stone and slate piece of Gothic Revival architecture that broached the northern edge of campus, where Mather spilled out into the urban wasteland of New Chester’s streets. It was a beautiful building, its stonework gilded with carvings and gargoyles, its front door tall and arched, and its windows all of stained glass. It was the type of architecture that had attracted me to the college in the first place. I’d looked at several places, but Mather, a two-hundred-year-old private college with just under a thousand students, had been the only place that felt right. With its gabled brick dorms, its archways, its elm-lined quad, it was like a campus stuck in some earlier time, the campus of a mystery novel set in the 1930s, where boys sang in barbershop quartets and girls in skirts walked briskly from class to class. To the deep dismay of my mother—who had been lobbying for Oberlin, her own alma mater, since I was five—and the unsurprising indifference of my father, I’d chosen Mather.
“Lily,” Eric said, after inviting me to Dunstan’s, “what’s your family name?”
“Kintner.”
“Oh, right. You’re Kintner. I heard you were here.” The way he’d said it sounded a little rehearsed, as though he’d already known who I was.
“You know my father?”
“Of course I do. He wrote Left over Right.”
I was surprised. Most of my father’s fans mentioned Slightest Folly, his boarding school farce, and I had never heard anyone mention his comedy about the life of a London tailor.
“What time?” I asked. I was propping open Barnard’s exterior door and was anxious to get inside.
“Ten-ish. Wait, hold on.” Eric dug into the pocket of his large coat and pulled out a small square card that he handed to me. It was white, printed with a letterpress image of a skull. “Show this at the front door.”
I said good night and entered my dorm. Jessica, my roommate, was still up and I told her about the invite. She was deeply invested in the social life of Mather and I was curious what she would know about Eric Washburn and the Thursday night party.
“You got a skull card,” she said and snatched it from my fingers. Then said, even louder, “You got a skull card from fucking Eric Washburn.”
“What do you know about him?”
“He’s like royalty. I think his great-great-great-great-grandfather basically built Mather. You honestly hadn’t heard of him?”
“I’ve heard of St. Dunstan’s.”
“Well, of course you’ve heard of St. Dun’s. Is the invite a plus one?”